UNDERDOG of PERFECTION

I love concept albums. They’re self-indulgent and pompous… two of the best traits a musician can have! (And anyone who thinks punk’s ascension in the late ’70s killed off pomposity in rock music is deluding themselves. Punk is as pompous as it can get!)

Anyway… the topic of concept albums came up in the RPM forums today, and I wrote such a self-indulgent and pompous post on the matter that I just felt I had to cross-post it here. To wit:

I don’t think I’m capable of making an album that’s not a concept album… although the nature of what constitutes a concept album can vary a lot. Let’s see… here’s a complete chronology of my solo albums and EPs since I really got into doing this in 2001.

THE DEWEY ‘JONE’ McNUKKLE STORY: SOUNDTRACK TO AN UNMADE FILM (September 2001)
Concept: All track titles are nicknames a particular friend of mine has had at some point in his life; music on each track corresponds to characteristics of the nickname.

TAI CHI AND CHAI TEA (October 2003)
Concept: Not so much, really, although I did structure the CD as if it were two sides, with a “Tai Chi” side and a “Chai Tea” side, and the track sequence was designed around that. Oh, and there’s a 13-minute, 5-“movement” suite about the Iraq war, to make up for the lack of an overall concept.

LIMITATIONS OF THE SYSTEM (EP, August 2004)
Concept: Atari. All of the tracks have Atari 2600 sounds incorporated in them.

INFLATIONARY COSMOLOGY (May 2005)
Concept: Can it get any more grandiose? The album represents the entire arc of the existence of the universe, from Big Bang to Heat Death. A suite in the middle also represents the entire arc of human existence from cavemen to the present day, in case it wasn’t pretentious enough already. I was so spent by the concept on this album that I went two years without recording anything after it was completed.

HIGHWAY 34 REVISITED (May 2007)
Concept: Probably the only thing I’ve ever done without a real concept, but I guess I was trying to capture the essence of all of my musical influences, right down to the second-hand nature of the album’s title.

DIVISION BY ZERO [VOL. I] (EP, August 2007)
Concept: The beginning of an extended autobiographical project. Each track has a year in the title and corresponds to some significant event in my life from that year. This 3-song EP features events from 1973 (my conception), 1976 (not sure, but it involves a new bed, vomit and hospitalization) and 1978 (pizza).

UNNATURAL DISASTERS (February 2008)
Concept: This was my RPM submission last year. The concept is strange places, or more accurately, places made strange by human activity. Each track is a sonic representation of some of my favorite made-weird-by-people places on earth.

TECHNETIUM (EP, February 2008)
Concept: A one-track, 38-minute “EP”; the characteristics of this minimalist techno track were determined based on properties of the technetium atom. Yeah… I forgot to mention “nerd alert.”

MELLOTRONIC (EP, July 2008)
Concept: The Mellotron. Oh, how I love it.

THE BEE LP! (October 2008)
Concept: Bees. All tracks represent something about bees and their behavior.

ANAGRAMMATIC PSEUDONYMS (February 2009)
Concept: This is going to be my RPM submission for this year. Each track title is an anagram of my name. The first letters of each of the 13 tracks, in order, spell out my name. How’s that for establishing some parameters for yourself.

Anyway… my reason for going on at such length here (besides extreme narcissism) is to perhaps give some ideas as to how broad the idea of a “concept album” can be — and how inspiring it can be to dive into a project like this with a specific concept in mind. I find I can be most creative when I have a set of parameters to work within. It gives me a starting point… and a destination.

As a kid I often wondered if the whole “dig a hole to China” idea really held water. I was suspicious that my hole through the center of the Earth wouldn’t actually come out within the boundaries of Asia’s most populous nation.

Of course, at the time I was probably so young that I wasn’t aware that China was Asia’s most populous nation, considering that I also somehow thought such a hole would actually be possible to dig. Oh yeah, and I never just, you know, looked at a globe to prove that it was a ridiculous proposition.

For a long time now, I’ve realized that line drawn from Minnesota through the center of the planet would emerge on the other side somewhere in the remote vastness of the southern Indian Ocean, but I never knew where until antipodr came along. Now I know that it would be roughly midway between Perth, Western Australia and the Kerguelen Islands, a place I have known about for approximately 5 minutes now, and which is apparently populated predominantly by feral cats, rabbits and sheep introduced by human visitors over the past couple of centuries. Sweet.

Well… I’m off to the garage for my shovel. Gotta start digging sometime!

I had to put that “or kids” in there because my kids like watching me play the “shooting holes” game, a.k.a. Portal. It is awesome. I’ve talked about it before, but it is worth mentioning again since I just found this video, and I had been playing it again earlier tonight.

I kind of suck at it though. I haven’t even gotten to the turrets that star in the video. But I since already know about the “Rosebud”-esque ending, this video doesn’t spoil it. Beware, it’s drenched in profanity and 1337-speak so it’s not for everyone. And it probably makes little sense if you’re not familiar with Portal. But I found it absolutely hilarious.

We web designers and developers need to keep track of more browsers than anyone should ever have to think about. (Isn’t one enough? And, even though I usually use Safari, can’t we all just agree on Firefox now and kill the rest?)

I’m just another in the chain of sites posting this graphic (which will probably proliferate exponentially now that it’s been on BuzzFeed): 1 – 2 – 3… and directly from here although this leaves me wondering who really is the originator. And of course, there’s the data source, cited in the image itself.

Well whoever came up with it, it’s pretty cool. And informative. I had forgotten the misfortune of Netscape 5, dying off two full years before Netscape 3 in the wake of the Mozilla split.

Enjoy…

I think it was probably around 1983 that I got my first Rubik’s Cube. Wasn’t that the year they really hit big in the U.S.? Anyway, I just never had the patience or the logical foresight to be able to solve it. Never. Not once. Oh, sure, I was able to solve one side. I think once I might have solved two. But I could never envision how to put it all together. It’s the same reason I suck at chess.

Before long, I knew that it wasn’t possible to just solve the whole thing one side at a time. And, unnervingly, when you were closest to having the whole puzzle solved, just a couple of turns away from a complete solution, there would be a sequence of moves where none of the sides were solved. That was just too much for my 9-year-old brain.

Eventually I just gave up on ever solving my Rubik’s Cube. It didn’t help that I had also learned that you could turn one side to a 45-degree angle, pop out the middle edge piece, and easily disassemble the entire thing, reassembling it in perfect order. And so it was, that my speedy solution to the Rubik’s Cube, sadly, always involved a screwdriver.

This year my parents gave me a Rubik’s Cube for Christmas. (It’s OK… that’s not the only thing they got me for Christmas. I also got this, which rocks.) Today I decided, by gum, I’m gonna solve it! Of course, not on my own. These days Rubik’s Cubes ship with a little pamphlet revealing the magical seven-step solution. (No, not seven moves, more like a hundred or so. But seven basic logical steps.)

I was doing great… halfway through the seventh and final step, when… well, the whole thing fell apart. Not literally. They’re made pretty well — and it’s no longer possible to pop out the edge piece with a screwdriver. (Don’t ask me how I know that it’s no longer possible. I just have my ways.)

I realized after a moment of fretting that I had misinterpreted part of Step 7. I was left with this:

One good side, and five sides of crap. (Much like Yessongs. Sorry… had to say it. Not too often you can work in a joke about a 36-year-old prog rock triple live album. By Yes.)

After dinner I was sufficiently distanced from my devastating defeat that I was willing to have another go, and this time… success!